Discover the Power of Authentic Assessment with Canvas & FeedbackFruits

Hello, everyone. See a bunch of you filtering in. We are gonna wait a few moments before we get the show on the road. Let some stragglers get into the room. But thank you you all so much for joining us, and please hold for, I don't know, sixty to ninety seconds. Someday, I'll have some old music playing, but today is not that day.

That'd have been smart. I've seen people with, like, countdown timers. Music is good, though. We do it for the next one. Sure.

While we're, waiting to get things kicked off, if y'all want to in the chat, let us know where you're dialing in from today. Right now, I'm dialing in from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. So on the other side of the world for many of you, I can imagine. What about you, Sid? You're still, in London? I'm in London. I assume we got a handful of humans joining us from across Europe.

So, yeah, jump into the chat. Let us know where where you're joining us from. Don't be shy. Oh, chat is disabled. Oh, dear.

Let's see if we can get that fixed. Alright. I assume chat is disabled since many of you are not able to insert your answers. Well, thank you for joining us regardless of where you are joining us from today. Really appreciate this.

We'll we'll get the show on the road now, recognizing it's three after this the midpoint through the hour. Really, want to start out by saying thank you all for taking time out in the middle of your week. Now we're approaching, a Friday, but I'm really excited to announce that we've got our friends here from FeedbackFruits joining us to talk a little bit more about authentic assessment. I'll quickly introduce myself. My name is Sidharth O'Broy.

I am our head of partnerships as well as business development here at Instructure. I've been with the company for about seven and a half years, lived in London for the last five and a half of those years. So, I have the opportunity to work with a plethora of partners across the globe, and I will happily say that our friends from Feedback Foods over in Amsterdam are are one of our favorites. They've delivered a lot of innovative technologies over the years that have provided an immense amount of value to our higher education institutions across the globe. And we're really excited to have an opportunity to institutions across the globe.

And we're really excited to have an opportunity to dive a little bit deeper around some of the value that they've really been able to highlight as it pertains to assessment inside of higher education. So with that, I'm gonna hand off to our our, you know, our our product marketing manager over at FeedbackFruits, Cole Groom, and we're also gonna have someone joining us from the, Texas A and M University, Patty Lunas. So let's start with Cole. Lovely. Hi, everybody.

So my name is Cole. Nice to meet you all, and thanks for joining. So as of very recently, I am now the product marketing manager at FeedbackFruits. Prior to that, I was working much more closely with our partners. So today, I'll be presenting with Patty Luna.

So we worked together very closely in the implementation of feedback fruits at the Health Science Center at Texas A and M. And so that's part of what I will talk about today here during this session. And Patty, I see you managed to fix the the computer and got it got back just in time. You wanna do a quick, introduction for yourself? Howdy. I'm Kylie Luna, director of academic technology at the School of Public Health.

I'm so sorry for my technical issues. Pleasure to be here. All good. All good. Well, they said, do you wanna tell us just a little bit more about the the partnership? I mean, I'm Yeah.

Absolutely. So, FeedbackFruits have been partners for a number of years now. And as highlighted previously, they they continue to deliver net new solutions that are innovating and things like engagement, assessment, as well as a variety of other areas. And and part of that is we've grown kind of the realms of our partnerships and the engagement types for what we're able to do with FeedbackFruits. And I that's a little bit of a teaser for what we'll discuss at the end of this call.

But we we've seen FeedbackFruits participate in a number of InstructureCons. So for those of you that are participating in InstructureCon, please please check them out. But the real value, that I'm excited about is how seamless the two technologies work together. Right? So, the way that Canvas and Feedback Foods is able to interact with one another in a deeply embedded environment through LTI is is really nifty. And we're having conversations to make those integrations even deeper and tighter to make things more seamless for our users.

So stay stay tuned probably for a webinar in the future, around some enhanced integrations that are coming, but excited to to dive in with, just focusing on assessment today. Lovely. Thanks, Sid. Yes. Because FeedbackFruit, we've been integrated with Canvas since twenty fifteen with the LTI integration, and had an official partnership with Instructure since twenty seventeen.

And part of what we do here today with this event and with this webinar, is kickoff, a new era of the relationship between FeedbackFruits and Instructure, entering more deeper partnership where there's gonna be enhanced collaboration between the two organizations. Part of that also, allowing Canvas institutions to get first access to new integration features such as a new tool, which we've launched, which is group formation, which was made first available to users on Canvas. And then as well as now even being able to add feedback for its to your existing Canvas agreement, so making things easier about how you integrate, tools into your ecosystem from a usage perspective and also from a contractual and procurement perspective. And what we do at Feedback Foods, part of why there we really want to, emphasize this partnership that we have with Instructure is that we want to work with institutions in, shifting from more passive learning strategies, things like lectures, reading, audio visual, and activating institutions to be able to move towards these more active learning strategies through discussions, through, getting students to apply their knowledge, and even more importantly, getting students to teach each other, because some of these things can be quite difficult and as well as time consuming. And what we do at Feedback Fruits is lower those barriers to adopting these active learning strategies directly inside of Canvas.

So just a little bit of a background of what it is we do at Feedback Fruits. We have our teaching and learning system, which has sixteen different tools, which help to bring these evidence backed pedagogies directly into Canvas. So whether if you wanna facilitate an authentic assessment strategy, that's what we're gonna talk about today with what they've, Patty and her team have done at Texas a and m. If you wanna facilitate more peer to peer learning, team based learning, you wanna engage students asynchronously, you wanna create more of these opportunities for students to collaborate and engage with their materials or even, focusing more on self assessment and helping teachers to save time when it comes to how they deliver engaging learning experiences, be it in an online environment, hybrid, or fully in person. But the really big mantra here at FeedbackFruit is when we work with our partner institutions, we wanna meet you where you are and scale when you're ready.

So whether you use one of the feedback for its tools, two of the feedback for its tools, use a full solution, or like Patty and the TAMU team having access to the full tool suite of Feedback Fruits, we provide kind of the tools in our platform to scale this good pedagogy across your institution through providing robust analytics that allow you to make data driven decisions, through being able to template activities so that they can be scaled across different courses, different departments, or even combining these different tools, these different learning activities to create comprehensive journeys that enhance your course designs at your institution. But, ultimately, what we're gonna talk about today is we wanna really dive into the topic of authentic assessment. And so for the agenda today, what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about, well, what is authentic assessment, and why is it important? Why is it even especially important right now in the age of AI and so much changing in how we assess students and what's important with how we assess students? So we're gonna start there. And then Patty is gonna give us an introduction to TAMU Health and then share four tips for implementing authentic assessments that they have, done themselves over the last, year and a half, two years. And we're gonna wrap it up with just a quick summary a quick summary at your school.

Yeah. And so, Patty, why don't you kick us off just telling us a little bit more about what is authentic assessment? Yes. I think, many of you have heard authentic assessment. What is that? So that's those are the types of assignments that an instructor creates. So engage the students with a problem or a task that is contextualized in a real environment.

And it assesses the knowledge and skills and attitudes that are required in the workplace for the future student going to the workplace or for lifelong learning. So we are moving from a traditional assessment to authentic assessments. So it's not just putting, questions response, but having response, but having them to reflect and, do a reflection on why they, choose that, response. So justification a solution. Not going from recall and recognition to building and applying what they have been learning in the classroom.

Authentic assessments move from, having assignments that are more learner centered rather than just the instructor designing something that needs to be graded. And also having an opportunity, the students having the opportunity to have these iterations of learning and assessing the learning, not just one single opportunity, not just one single multiple choice quiz. And, another important thing is that the instructor is going to be able to see the evidence of learning, rather than just having a completing a a task. Yep. Exactly.

Because from authentic assessment, taking this much more targeted focus on the skill development of students rather than just their performance on some particular type of task. Right? So some examples of these more authentic types of tasks or assignments that you can see thinking about it more from a discipline specific perspective would be in business. Really popular application in business is designing solutions for an identified work workplace problem. So more of a case study approach to an assignment rather than just multiple choice exams. In computer science, getting students to build a website based on particular criteria or coding language or in English, writing a satirical essay, examining a social phenomenon, picking out some of these ways that even in these disciplines like English and composition and writing where you don't have this luxury of moving away from written assignments, which we see becoming more popular now because of chat g p t.

So in business, it's really easy to ask students to do a presentation instead of doing a written assignment. But in some departments, that's not, so easily done. But finding some of those ways that you can add that more complexity or more of that personal experience into an assignment so that it's much less easily, copied or created using tools like AI and and and chat g p t, or even anatomy and physiology, writing accident reports, or doing role play scenarios as a way to make those more authentic tasks and those skill development tasks, which are relevant to those future disciplines and jobs that students will be working in the workforce. Yeah. So the benefits of having authentic assessments is that you are nurturing real, real life and career readiness in the two, skills student student skills.

And you are going to integrate the teaching and learning and assessment, commonly known as aligning your what you are teaching, what the students are learning, and how you are assessing that learning. And it's going to optimize the outcomes in the classroom and outside the classroom. Also, you are, increasing the student autonomy and self regulation. And, by having, different iterations and different ways to assess learning, you are also providing multiple options for personalized learning, and the students could have also personalized learning paths. You are also allowing for timely guidance tailored to individual needs.

Yeah. Absolutely. But, it's a a really positive strategy to implement, but it's it's not always so easy. Right, Betty? There's there's quite some challenges that come with it as well. Yes.

Exactly. And, part of the things that we have done with Take Back Fruits is that when you have, like, for example, you have a class with, five sections and those type of sections are taught by different instructors. So how we set up these authentic assessments so they are, consistent and they are objective, then we set up rubrics. We develop rubrics, and we are able to develop in templates that we can share with other instructors and throughout the school as well. And, we tie the criteria to assessment throughout the course.

It means the outcomes and learning outcomes. With Canvas, we can do that. And you can type the, assessments to your outcomes that we we program the outcomes for the whole school so the instructors can go and choose the outcomes and tie to the rubrics and also to the quizzes if we are using quizzes. We are facilitating the peer and instructor feedback in large cohorts, and we're gonna talk about one of the examples that we did for the interprofessional education. And, also with the learning analytics in Figma Foods, you are able to see how the students are, having that progress in the learning and how the the students are working as a group.

You have a lot of detail and granular data so you can see how the students are working throughout the the course and how you can, help them to, with the with the with the learning. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Because now as I was kind of alluding to already earlier with the age of AI, assessments are changing.

Right? It's this time for the institution to rethink how are we assessing our students with respect to the tools that they have available to them with how they complete these assessments, but also the tools that they have available to them them as they go into the workforce. Right, because we want to prepare these students for how they can be successful in the real world. And so there's a couple of tips, that we've seen from other institutions, from the research of, well, what do we wanna focus on when it comes to assessments now in the age of AI? And so these five points are, one, that you want assessments to be continuous and holistic. So you wanna give multiple assessment points throughout the course to reflect progress, not just the onetime grade. So just having one midterm and one final isn't always gonna be enough anymore.

We wanna help students to develop and see those improvements over time, but also giving them assessments that are multimodal. So using different types of media to assess students, but also to get them familiar with the different types of, the media forms that they have to express themselves and to create work. And so especially with ChatGPT, in those disciplines where you have the luxury of being able to shifting away from written assignments, doing things that are more presentation based, oral based, video based, all these different options that you have out there with different forms of media. But also taking this approach to focus assessments that are more skill based rather than recall or recognition based. And so making sure that we make that, transparency to students about the key competencies, these programmatic level outcomes, these institutional level outcomes that we want students to be developing during their time at university.

I know at least during my time when I was studying, we would do a lot of group projects. We would do a lot of things. There was also a lot of multiple choice exams, but it was never explicitly communicated about that. Hey. Doing these group projects, we want you to build your collaboration skills, your problem solving skills, your critical thinking skills.

So bringing that transparency towards why assessments are done and what skills specifically are being measured through these assessments can make a really big difference for students. But we also wanna combine as we do continuous and holistic and multimodal assessments. We wanna make sure that there's formative as well as summative assessments, giving students that chance to learn, giving students the chance to fail as well. Right? Because there's a lot of learning lessons that can be done in having students, with that safety and that opportunity to take a chance and to fail, as well and to learn from those. But then also making sure that we have multilayer types of assessments, so where students can self reflect bigger emphasis on self assessment, while also having more peer feedback and instructor feedback, combining all of that so that students have this more comprehensive view of where their feedback is coming from.

And so there's a couple different ways that this can be facilitated through the technical ecosystem and infrastructure that you set up at your institution. And so, Patty, what are some of these kind of things that you could see from a technology perspective how we can facilitate more of these kind of assessment strategies that we just talked about? Yeah. As I mentioned before, it is very easy to design the templates and the assignments so you can have objective assignments so multiple people can, can grade assignments, in in a specific way. You are also supporting, like you mentioned, different multimodal activities. So you are providing the students with different ways to assess the learning.

And also, it's not just based on your score one hundred, it's are you able to master the skills in the course? So we are more center on what the students need to learn rather than just what the instructor needs to complete. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So then part of facilitating holistic scoring and assessment is having this ability to have a robust framework for rubrics, specifically rubrics that are attached or at least dialing up to the skills and competencies that we want students to be able to develop.

So this is one of the things that in feedback for it's we facilitate, is to be able to create these many different types and styles of rubrics, but then mapping them to the different skills and competencies that you want to, develop in students and being able to track and pull data and reports on the performance of students across these different skills and competencies as they aggregate over time through their different assessments at the individual assignment level, but also at the course level and even at the entire programmatic level. But then we also want to have a diverse set of pedagogical approaches towards, these types of assessments. So making sure that it's not just one way that we're assessing students, but having many different ways to assess students. And so also part of what we'll see here now with Patty's presentation around how they've been using feedback fruits at Texas a and m is through these sixteen different tools in the feedback fruits teaching and learning system, having that ability to deliver learning assignments based on these different pedagogies to assess students. And then lastly, being able to, track that competency development and mastery over time.

So this is just an example of kind of a a student portfolio where they can see across all these different learning activities that they've participated in across their program, how they're developing on these programmatic level outcomes over time. But with that, Patty, we wanted to talk a little bit more about TAMU Health and some of the things that y'all have been doing to facilitate authentic assessments. Yeah. So, Texas A and M Health is composed by five, schools, public health, dentistry, nursing, medicine, and pharmacy. And we have a office for interprofessional education and research.

So more than five thousand students have been using paper fruits for the last eighteen months. And this is just, this is for undergrad and grad courses, in person and online hybrid. So if we move to the next slide, please. As we said, we started in the spring of twenty twenty three, and till today, we are using Figma fruits. We have more than one hundred and fifty faculty members using Figma Fruits, different tools.

We have access to the sixteen tools, and, they create the the activities in their courses. They copy, export and, import the the activities semester by semester. They have created all kind of activities from, individual activities to group activities. They participate in online discussions. And, we're gonna talk about the examples of, some of the most common examples of activities that we have been using, with Deep Path Grids.

So we move to the next, slide. Yeah. So and one thing I also wanted to highlight, Patty, across the health science center, I mean, how many students are there? Not not more than five thousand. Right? Yeah. No.

Five thousand is five thousand. Uh-huh. So to see over three thousand students participating in these activities is a a really significant adoption, especially for such a short timeline that that the tools have been used. Yeah. Correct.

But so what we're gonna do now, this was just a little bit of a prelude to kind of how me and Patty are here today, presenting with with all of you. We're gonna go through kind of four tips for implementing authentic assessment, and then we're gonna show the assignment examples of how they've implemented these tips in assignments used in live courses at Texas A and M. And so the first tip around authentic assessment is around being very clear with the objectives and the goals to students. And so some of the ways that they've done this, at TAMU Health was through building out a really good set of rubrics inside of feedback fruits and applying those across the different assessments, that they're assessing students in. So through using these rubrics and, making them visible to the students, making it very clear how they're being assessed and what type of objectives and goals they they should be working on.

Yeah. So I wanna talk about one of the, best practices that we have right now with Figma fruits and Canvas. For example, if they would need to work on an individual essay, faculty member creates an assignment where they need to work on a draft. And before the fact the instructor gives them feedback, they submit the assignment and feedback routes gives them automated feedback. And also they can go through the peer review feedback.

And that way, they're going to polish the essay and then submit that as a final draft. But, having the automated feedback is very useful. So we move to the next slide. With the AI component in feedback routes, the automated feedback can be done as reviewing the content and the structure, reviewing the academic language, if they are using active voice or, they need to pay attention to the grammar, the punctuation, the spelling, or is the format, very useful that they have people who has different formats so they can work their references, like, for example, APA seven. You set up the settings for the assignment, and then the students are the automatic feedback highlights where they need to fix those errors or those, typos or those things for the format before they submit the the work, in Canvas.

You can also have some, feedback on the tables and figures if you need to pay attention to that. So, when they when after they have done the automated feedback, they also receive feedback from the their peers. So you are using the same rubric that the instructor is going to use to grade the assignments. And that's another way to receive feedback, like another opportunity to review the work before they submit to the final, the final submission to this to the instructor. So they have a practice with the drafts.

And, in the next slide, we're gonna see that Figma Fruits has this very visual way to see how students are performing. So the the graphic on the left is a draft, and the student was able to see how they were performing. The proficient, column has two, three students there, then the experience and the exemplary. The graphic on the right, as you can see, even visually, the colors change. So the instructor was able to see that, based on the automated feedback and the peer review, the students were doing some improvements.

And in this case, it wasn't specific on the APA formatting, but also, that helped, the instructor to start designing these assignments so they are authentic assessment. It's not just one opportunity for them to submit their assignment and that's it. So they got multiple layers of feedback, and that really helps the students. Amazing. And what are some of the things you've heard from faculty, Patty, just around using the feedback for its peer review tool specifically? Like, some of the things that that for them are are really key.

So for graduate students, having the formatting because they do work on essays and papers, Feedback Foods also has templates for case studies, for thesis, for essays, projects. So all those are very are already set and you just choose the, thesis, for example, and it goes through the all the format that a thesis should have. So instead of the instructor spending time on on correcting citations and references, the automatic feedback, those are for the instructors. So that saves some time for that specific, grading. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. And so here, what Patty's done is highlight just the cut one of the AI features in feedback fruits, which is this automated feedback tool. So being able to set up the AI to guide and give feedback to students on their academic writing. But there's also one other area, specifically thinking of a peer review use case where in feedback for you can use AI to actually help coach students on what it means to give good feedback.

Because what we see from the research is that around forty to fifty percent of peer feedback given in a in a peer review context is less than ten words. And so here, this is one of the areas where at FeedbackFruits, we have this automated feedback coach. So as students are going through and giving feedback to each other than a peer review or a group evaluation, It will coach them on what it means to give good feedback. So if they do something good, like you're, or something bad, like you're not giving good feedback, the automated feedback coach lets them know that, hey. Your feedback is not constructive, and here's a couple areas where you could actually improve that.

So we wanna guide that student through and coach them on what it means to give good feedback. Because, of course, it's amazing through a peer review process that they were able to improve the quality of the final deliverables before they were turned into the teacher, like in the use case that Patty just presented. But we also wanna emphasize the importance of developing these feedback literacy skills through these types of assessments like peer review. We wanna get students comfortable with the process of giving feedback, giving good feedback, but also with receiving feedback and then being able to take action on that and make those changes. And that's where you see those improvements in those final deliverables that the students were working on by going through this peer review process.

So just a couple of the the small ways that FeedbackFruits is using AI in the tools, but nice to highlight as well. And so this is a little bit about the results just kind of across some of these different peer review use cases you have at TAMU Pati. Is there anything here you wanna just kinda add to to some of this this data? Yes. Just to close the loop on the peer review process, a group member evaluation is really helpful. You have these even for undergraduate students or graduate students working in groups.

I think that not everybody works the same way even if they are in graduate courses. So you really want to evaluate how the team is working, and you can do that with a group member evaluation. And that has been very helpful for the instructors and also for the students. They make them accountable and on the work that they do. Those, member evaluations can be anonymous, so they don't need to feel like they're going to be exposed when they are rating one of the peers.

So, having the peer review, automated feedback, and group member evaluation all typed in one learning journey is very useful. Yeah. I think the other really cool thing to highlight here is that these numbers are averages. So what this means is on average, students are giving and receiving around seventy five different ratings. But per student, twenty seven pieces of feedback across these different assignments that they've participated in.

So it really shows a high volume of the amount of feedback going through. And, also, y'all have a just an amazing completion rate on your assignments with ninety seven percent of students completing this process of doing a peer review, which I think is quite extraordinary. Maybe people in the crowd have, experienced, you know, what usually completion rates are on on some assignments, especially ones like like peer review that might be optional. So re really great to see some of those things as well. And so as we move to the second authentic assessment tip, the second one here is about creating multimodal activities that mix audio, video, or written materials course materials, that you use in your course, you want to, incorporate them in, that you use in your course, you want to, incorporate them in, but also make them engaging.

And this is something that Patty and her team have done really, really well with their course materials. So, Patty, I'll I'll I'll give it to you to just talk a little bit more about kind of what you've done with making some just standard study materials in your course more interactive. Someone asked what are the benefits of having authentic assessment? Besides the completion, it's the engagement. Students are engage engaging with the content, engaging with the peers, and engaging with the instructors. So interactive document and video are very popular in our school because you can use, PDFs, you can use, readings, you can use a video, and embed the questions within the those learning materials.

And that way, you I have heard, these, an instructor said, I spend three hours making my video, and I don't know if they watch my video. So this is a way to do it because that way you are, creating an assignment with the interactive video. And even if it's asynchronous, you can embed questions and ask the students to interact with you in the video as ynchronously. So you know that when they go and watch the video, you are asking questions and they're going to respond within the video. And they also have an opportunity to respond to peers and have open discussions within these learning materials.

So you have everything in one place. You don't have a link to a YouTube video, and then they open in another assignment, and then they open another discussion board. So you have everything in one. So that's why they are so popular because they really work. And for interactive documents, we have have the completion rates of more than ninety five percent even if the assignments, have just, like, the ten percent of the waiting final grade.

So that's on the second slide, I think. Even the other as we were preparing for this, Patty, and and pulling the screenshots, you know, when you see this example from, here on the screen, this is from a real assignment. And just look at the depth of the post that students are creating and discussing with each other. And I think this assignment didn't even require students to contribute to the discussion, but it shows that when you open up this space for the students to be able to discuss and interact, one, in a place where it's relevant directly inside of the materials, but also to do it asynchronously, a lot of times students will take advantage of that opportunity and engage themselves just by having that that space and that opportunity. But one thing you've done really well is also apply these thinking routines to these types of assignments, which I think is something super interesting and I didn't know about until until I met you.

Yeah. So if, I I guess we're gonna share these slides with the the people that attended this webinar. That's the link to the one of the papers that we did in the, in this spring semester. So this professor has used interactive document, so students read the chapters before the class. But it's not just read the chapter and discuss.

And peer, post one, discussion post and then reply to two peers. So this is more done with a structure, and we have been using thinking routines which scaffolds the learning. So for example, it asks them, what did you notice that was new from what you learned? And what challenged you from the reading? And what are the things that you need to think about? So those are thinking routines, the link to the project zero, are there I mean, the references. And I as I said, we have ninety five percent of completion for these assignments. This is a hybrid class.

So students are asked to read the chapters and then they go to the classroom, and then they have this fishbowl. So by groups, they participate in the classroom, and the instructor, says that they have been reading the the chapters because they need to complete these discussion boards online, but also participate in person. So this was one of the evidence that, the interactive and thinking routines and having feedback routes really, makes a difference. Amazing. And then here, I think we even have some of the data from the participation across some of these different assignments that that y'all have set up.

Yeah. So, of the other screenshot, we have two point five comments on average created by students. We have, like, the those are the learning analytics that you see in Figma Fruits in all of the assignments. You see how many students have completed the assignment and how many comments that have they done in the particular assignments. So you can also export that as a spreadsheet, which is not possible with any other tool.

Exactly. And some some really good I think it what's funny is actually, Patty, this slide we even forgot to update from when we did this presentation at InstructureCon last year. Because if I do the math on sixteen point five k comments created across the one point seven k students in these assignments, it's it's even gone up over the recent semesters, the amount of engagement that you've seen across these these different types of assignments. And so here even in these ones, in the videos, specifically, like, nine point five comments on average. So it shows that in a space that would have traditionally been very passive.

Right? It's just content inside of Canvas that a student would interact with. I sit by myself. I read a document. I watch a video maybe while I'm cooking dinner. But then you've created this this space where students are engaging with it.

I've had to answer questions. I've had to create these comments and and interact with my peers. So building that engagement asynchronously in a place where it traditionally just might not have happened. Really powerful. I don't know if there was anything you wanted to talk about here.

I think this is, like, maybe more just on the video side of things than than the document, but pretty similar to what we Yes. On the on this, interactive video, what I wanted to show is that they you can have the online discussions and then students can respond with a a video as well. Uh-huh. They're saying there is a question on the on the chat. Oh, yeah.

What do you think is the hardest part about getting faculty to adopt authentic assessments? Change is very difficult, But what I have, seen that is easy to do is you get some champions, get them trained, get familiar with the tools, and those champions are going to teach others. And so usually people come to my office and say, can you share the template that so and so did? Because she told me that that assignment really worked and I want to try it out. So I think the key is just develop that relationship with the the instructors and then get some champions and get some things to try out and get dirty in the sandbox, try things, on the on both sides, like how the students are going to see the assignments, how the instructors should design the assignments, and just help them. That's that's a job that we do as an EdTech and instructional designers. Yeah.

No. Really good answer, Patty. Because if I think back when I was writing my bachelor's thesis, we we did a research on how what was the strategies to get the highest adoption of new technologies by faculty. And so we compared, just traditional workshops. We compared paid programs.

We compared a couple different, yeah, like in app messaging and a few different things. But what we found was the most effective was faculty led initiatives. So whether it's a faculty led workshop or word-of-mouth, hearing from another colleague, but that that had the biggest impact on a faculty member's decision to try something new or implement a new technology in their course because they were able to see that this has been done before. This was successful. And they can look back and see that, example and have that, testimonial from from their peers, and that had the biggest impact on how they decide to adopt something new or try Yeah.

And if I also can mention that sometimes the other external tools that you have available are don't do not integrate seamlessly and they don't connect easily with the great group, formation or they live in a separate website. So that's not the case of Figma Fruse. Do you have I've got Canvas here, so I can just really quickly show the integration before we jump into a new a new assignment. But then, for example, this is like a peer review activity. And so here with feedback for it, it's integrated directly inside of Canvas.

There's no separate platform. There's no separate logins. It syncs all of the the groups. It syncs all of the grades and even the deadlines with the Canvas calendar. And then all of this you can do just directly here in Canvas.

Yeah. Thanks for the questions, y'all. I appreciate it. If anybody has any more questions, please feel free to throw them in the chat, and we can kind of address them as we go along. But But here we are onto the third authentic assessment tip, and it's around encouraging space to have more collaboration, but even more specifically, team based learning.

And so this was part of how, the journey between Feedback Fruits and and Texas a and m even started was actually with this team based learning use case. And so thinking about team based learning, this more formal, pedagogy of team based learning where it used to be done on pen and paper and could only be facilitated in a face to face class environment and generally required quite a lot of setup time for faculty members because you had to set up and configure these scratch cards. So you had to order the scratch cards. You had to get them. You had to mark all the correct answers.

You had to hand them out to all the students. They had to be present in class, and they would go through and, yeah, scratch off these cards and and get the answers. And I'll explain a little bit more about the the the setup of these assignments in a moment. But, ultimately, what we've done is digitize that that pen and paper process and brought it directly into your LMS so that then you can facilitate and deliver, team based learning activities regardless of your course modality. And we're gonna talk about how Patty and her team delivered team based learning in a fully online course, which is something that just wouldn't have been possible before.

But talking a bit more about the TBL pedagogy, it's a way that you want to get students to develop collaborative problem solving skills. And so the way that you do this is you will put students into groups. I think generally three, four, five students max in in a group for for team based learning. And before class or maybe just at the beginning, students will individually go through some type of preparation. They'll have document, a video, some type of material where they are gonna learn about the concept that will be applied in the team based learning activity.

Then after they've learned a little bit about it, they will take a short quiz. So they will take a quiz by themselves. As they're going through and taking this quiz, they're not gonna see the correct answers. So they just answer it, and they don't know if they got it right or not. Then the students come together into their teams, into their groups, and they go through and answer that exact same quiz but together as a group.

And so it allows them to talk through the questions, to problem solve, to hear the opinions of others, and ultimately have to make a decision on what they think together as the group is the correct answer. Then they will see the correct answer, so they'll know if they got it right or not. And then, generally, the teacher will facilitate a clarification session. So they will see the results of all the teams and the students, and they'll talk about the questions, they'll give some clarifications, they'll go into any questions that the students might have. Then the really great part is a lot of times there will be an application exercise.

So then students, after they've gone through this quizzing process, they'll actually have to apply this knowledge that they've done through some type of assignment. It might be a case study. It might be, a discussion. It might be some type of, deliverable that they need to work on. Then, ultimately, they'll turn that in and do a gallery walk.

So you go and you see all the projects of the other students. You can discuss, talk about them. And then at the end, students will do a peer evaluation. So they will evaluate the team members that they worked with throughout this team based learning process to give them some feedback on their collaboration skills. How much did they contribute, were they a good team member, these types of things.

So, preventing free riding, keeping people accountable, but also, again, developing that those feedback literacy skills. And so how this is facilitated in feedback fruits is through a learning journey, through a combination of some of these different features and tools that are available through the teaching and learning system. So first, you can use the interactive documents or the interactive videos to allow students to review some content before class. In our team based learning tool, we can deliver these IRAT, the the individual quiz, and the TRAT, the team quiz. Then the clarification session and the application problem, these will generally be done in class or on Zoom.

And then if you wanna do a gallery walk, it can be done in our discussion on work tool. And then there's a group member evaluation step is also integrated as this workflow inside of a singular TBL activity. But, Patty, the way that you did TBL at at TAMU and in these interprofessional courses was really, a very innovative application to do this type of pedagogy online. Can you tell us a bit more about it? Yeah. So, we have used team based learning for the education courses.

The IPE team forms the groups, one student per school, and they design the activities. And they also have seventy faculty members that act as facilitators, so they got those groups of students Because we have five, students per school, it's not easy to get them, in person, so everything is done online. The work that they do is online and for, they answer to the individual assessment, and then they get together in a Zoom meeting to respond to the team, based quiz. And then they prepare the the document on how to solve the case and, give a solution. Then they also are graded with a group member evaluation.

So we started using TBL in the spring of twenty twenty three, and we were new. All of the facilitators were new to Figma Fruits, but we got them to work with, Figma Fruits as facilitators. They didn't design the activities, but everything was, all set up for them. And we didn't have any issues with the seventeen members, facilitating the the group, the group assignments. So and this is the second year that we have been using TVL this way, and this is the only way that we were able to do it.

Yeah. Amazing. And then how were you able to do it in in a fully online course with that asynchronously as well? Yeah. So as I mentioned, this is an online course. They get their they get together and decide that they need to meet on Zoom to respond to the to the TRAT, and everything else is done online.

They get together. They work as a group, and they are accountable. So this is one of the best, examples of authentic assessments. They are learning on cases that they will need for their careers. So we're talking about nurses.

We're talking about, doctors, even, community health, people, dentists. So they learn things that they're going to do in their real life. Yep. Exactly. And then once and one of the things that's always really important just to highlight about the TVL pedagogy in general is what you'll almost always see is that when you compare the scores from the individual readiness quiz to the team quiz, you'll see those improvements of students learning together as a group by working together.

And when students can also see and see that comparison of, wow, when I was working together in this group, I was scoring better. We're coming to a better answer. It also highlights to them the value of working in a team and the importance of collaboration and collaborative problem solving. But then afterwards, they, of course, have to give each other feedback. Right? Yeah.

And this is the part of what I was mentioning before. The group member evaluation is really important, and it gives them the way to provide feedback to their peers, but, also, the tool provides insights on how groups are working together. And the tool is very powerful that they can identify outliers and also some people add the group contribution factors. So they can you can see who is working more and who is just having a free ride. So the tool, helps them with that.

I've I've, I've heard people that has using, peer reviews or group member evaluations with a Qualtrics survey or an Excel sheet, and that takes them, like, eight hours of work. So with this, you just, set up the rubric for the group member evaluation, and the tool does it for you so you don't have to spend those hours. Yeah. Amazing. Saving faculty a lot of time compared to TBL where you would've had to set up the scratch cards, do it in person, then collect them all back, average the grades, manually enter them back into the into the LMS.

The faculty that are doing team b TBL are very, very dedicated to the idea and of teaching in this way. So it's been, for such a long time, a very select group of people who believe in it and will spend their time and effort to to deliver courses built on TBL. But what our goal is through providing a tool like this and having template assignments and being able to reuse them across courses is to have that ability to scale the team based learning pedagogy. Because like Patty said, it's one of those truly authentic ways to assess students, but also to get them to work together and go through assignments in a very different way that they probably haven't done before. So really, really cool pedagogy and part of what what brought FeedbackFruits and and TAMU together.

But with that, in our last, five minutes or so, we've got our final authentic assessment tip, which is around being able to provide personalized but also skill oriented feedback. And so, Patty, what are some of the ways that you've been working with your faculty to work on providing some more of this personalized and and skill oriented feedback? So, something that a faculty member really like was once you have that rubric and you use the assignment review tool, so students, upload their final assignment. If you work on a draft and this is the final assignment, you are using the same rubric if they use a peer review. And when you have the rubric and you highlight something on the text, you can, link that highlighting, the highlight text that you are using to an specific criterion in the rubric. So everything is, linked.

Everything is tied to the how you want them to, improve their their assignments. It saves you time. You can reuse those rubrics as well. You can do the inline feedback with the rubric criterion as I was saying. And, also, you can give the students points for reading your feedback.

So that's another thing that you can add to the to the assignment. So you want them to read your feedback, then you add that as a part of the assignment. Because I can remember just at least when I was a student that, especially on a final assignment. Right? You wait and you turn something in. You think, okay.

Alright. I really hope I pass. Then a grade comes back. You see that you pass, and you go, great. Onto the next one.

And the the the feedback, you don't have that same, connection to or importance, especially if it's that last assignment of the course. So then here, incentivizing students to engage with that feedback. Hey. You're not gonna get full credit for this assignment if you don't come in and and read your feedback. Can be a nice way to make sure that all that time spent by a faculty member grading and trying to give good feedback isn't for nothing.

And that that that student is at least seeing it, and then they can also even reply to that feedback. So it's also about creating that dialogue around improvement and feedback in these types of things. And so I know the use case at Tamo Health was, a lot focused on more document type of submissions. But another really nice thing with this tool in assignment review is that you can also provide and give granular feedback on video submissions. So, again, thinking back to shifting to more diverse deliverables, getting students to do presentations and role plays rather than doing, you know, written essays and whatnot.

As you make that shift to diverse deliverables, you don't want it to come at the expense of being able to give students quality feedback. So then here, if a student uploads a video or slides or an Excel sheet or an audio file, you can leave that feedback time stamped directly inside of that deliverable inside of that video, that audio file. And that time stamped feedback can be connected directly to the criteria of the rubric. So making sure the feedback is, relevant, that is contextual, and that it's also connected back to those learning outcomes that we want students to focus on. So these are just some of the testimonials, Patty, that I know that you've heard kind of from those experience reading feedback fruits.

Is there maybe one that resonates with you that you would wanna read out to the group? We don't have to read all of them. Overall, our students really like the tools, but faculty, at this point, we need the tools, to be able to create assignments, authentic assignments, engaging, and assignments that are useful and then save time for faculty, feedback has been phenomenal. Amazing. Amazing. Thanks.

And so just to wrap it up, kind of like the four key takeaways and and conclusions here if you're to remember one thing about this presentation, is that, well, authentic assessment's really important. It's a good way to have holistic assessments and focus on the assessment of of students' skills and knowledge compared to just their, retention and ability to to regurgitate information. But it's also really important to ensure that you have these different ways, these multiple means of engagement with different types of learning activities as a way to enhance that student skill development. But, right, it's really easy to say these things, but a lot of work goes into it. So teachers are more likely to innovate their learning designs when they have the right tools to support them in a way that they can innovate these learning designs while also saving time is one of, like, the really key things we believe in here at FeedbackFruits is that time saving is the catalyst for good pedagogy.

Faculty are busy. They have a lot on their plates, and just telling them, hey. This is the right thing to do. I'm sure many of you know from firsthand experience. It's not enough to to create that change.

So you wanna help them save time while doing the right thing and while, teaching with these different types of learning activities. But at the end of the day, we're called feedback fruits for a reason. Peer to peer learning, collaborative learning are really some of the most effective ways to to engage more with students and help them, support them through that learning process. So these are the four things that we wanted to wrap up just as, like, a key takeaway from today's session. And what we also have is some additional resources for explanations.

So with the recording, I'm pretty sure these, slides are gonna be made available, but we do have a new ebook, on AI and, AI driven transformation now in the age of the future. We also have a use case, so kind of a written version of a lot of what we've talked about today here with Patty. And what we have as well is also the new learning design community from FeedbackFruits. So these are template assignments, rubrics, and learning journeys that you can download directly from our website. So you can take them into a PDF form and apply them across whatever other third party tools you might use.

Or if you're a free FeedbackFruits user from our website, you can implement these templates directly into your LMS. So we'll share these with everybody kind of as part of the of the recording. And, yeah, all of this was here as part of the partnership with with Instructure and Feedback Fruits, and we'll be at Vegas in a few weeks for InstructureCon. So super excited to hopefully see some of you there. Any closing remarks from your side, Sid, just on the partnership side of things? No.

Thank you so much, Cole and Patty. I I think Cole mentioned this earlier on in the presentation. If you all are interested in procuring feedback for you, it's just part of our new relationship with with feedback for you as in co selling them. You are able to procure them directly through Instructure. So if if that's of interest, please let your CSM or your other points of contact at Instructure know.

But once again, wanna thank Cole and Patty for a lovely webinar today and doing a deep dive into authentic assessment. Hope everyone enjoys the rest of your week. Thank you all for tuning in. Cheers. Thanks, everybody.

And here's, just some contact information from Patty and also from a key contributor, doctor Christine Kaunas, who really helped us to to make this project successful. So, thank you guys for joining. Really appreciate your time. And thank you, Patty. Thank you.